


happy hour

by doublejoint



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Future Fic, Other, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: If the people at the label had heard the version they’d done tonight, they’d probably be sure they’d chosen right, but Alex has never been more sure that they’d chosen wrong.
Relationships: Alexandra Garcia/Himuro Tatsuya/Kagami Taiga
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	happy hour

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to [seishundays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seishundays) for the band!au kagahimualex feels a few years back :') an excellent Concept
> 
> some stuff is glossed over here but /shrug maybe this will get a backstory someday

Alex is the one who suggests they go on tour again, the casual half-joking tone intentional in her voice, and leaning into seriousness in the larger half. She shouldn’t have to pretend, or pretend to pretend, with Tatsuya and Taiga, after this long, but it still feels like something they should have done already if they were going to, something for which the opportunity’s expired and rotted away. She leans back in her chair, looks away from Tatsuya and Taiga on the couch, Tatsuya on his phone and Taiga tearing into another bag of potato chips, her eyes to the ceiling. Getting the words out wasn’t so hard, was it?

“I’d like to,” says Taiga. 

Alex looks back; he’s setting the bag of chips down on the coffee table. Tatsuya’s thumb hovers over his phone screen but he’s looking at Taiga, a smile twisting at his features (maybe before he’s aware of it, or maybe he’s actually let it--he’s doing that much more now).

“Me too,” Tatsuya says. 

The smile reaches his eye, and when he looks at Alex Taiga’s looking at him. 

This is a good idea.

* * *

She didn’t drink when they were on tour way back when because she was the adult, and she doesn’t drink now because she doesn’t, generally, but she still finds herself back on the sticky side of the bar, perched on a stool that’s too short for her feet to sit comfortably on the rest in heels and too long for her toes to sit flat on the floor. This time she’s not busy trying to stop the bartenders from getting suckered into giving Tatsuya a drink and Tatsuya’s not trying to sweet-talk them, cordially letting one of them flirt with him (probably in the hopes of better tips) and occasionally stealing a chip from Taiga’s second plate of nachos. 

“I’m surprised they don’t hate us,” says Alex when someone flags the bartender down at the other end. “We’re paying happy-hour prices for food and have one well drink and two tap waters.”

“Yeah, well,” says Taiga. “They don’t seem to be complaining.”

(It is a hotel bar; it never was back in the day, except in the fancier hotels; if Alex closes her eyes she can see the designer clothes they’d all had on loan but then she smells the jarred soy-honey glaze of her boneless wings and opens her eyes and they are all this much older, this far removed from the last hit they’d had as a group, or the last time any of them had charted individually. A bunch of has-beens who will probably lose money on their self-footed tour after they pay for gas for the van, food and drink and hotel stays, retail prices for new guitar strings. How’s this for a vacation, though?)

“Our newest live video has 50k,” says Tatsuya, stirring the ice in his drink. “In a day, that’s good.”

Thank God, Alex thinks, that streaming numbers weren’t what they are now when the numbers had mattered to them. (Well, to Alex and to Taiga; they still do and will always matter to Tatsuya; Alex won’t try and push him into becoming a manager but he does have the right kind of focus to be good at it, the kind of charisma that will make some young kid try to work as hard as he does.) Alex pulls out her own phone.

“Selfie to celebrate?”

There’s a smear of queso on the edge of Taiga’s lip, hard to see if you’re not looking. The light in here fucking sucks. Alex posts it and turns her phone off and drops it into her purse, hung on the hook underneath the bar.

“Can we get out of here soon? I want to run through a couple of songs.”

* * *

They’ve mostly booked small venues in large cities, ten blocks away from the bigger stages they used to play, scattered empty seats. The acoustics are good though, and the staff know everything about where to set up to get the sound they’re going for on every song. One has a grand piano that takes up half the stage, in good enough tune for Tatsuya to use. They thread guitar cables under it and stand behind it on the open side of the stage, looking at Tatsuya’s fingers on the keys when they play. 

This one’s smaller than their usual places, and maybe that’s why the place is packed and they do two encores and run out of songs and go with one of the ones they’d all lobbied at various times to get on one album or another but it had never made the cut. If the people at the label had heard the version they’d done tonight, they’d probably be sure they’d chosen right, but Alex has never been more sure that they’d chosen wrong.

* * *

Taiga is the one who threads his fingers through both of theirs while they’re all watching late-night TV on the bed, the host filling up time between guests by adding words and exaggerating his expressions until Alex almost can’t bear to watch his caked-on makeup move with the muscles on his face.

It doesn’t have to mean what it does, but Taiga won’t leave room for ambiguity, especially not where Tatsuya’s concerned. But they all need something solid to stand on, a bassline to fall back on, a beat to keep between the three of them. 

They fall asleep on the one queen-sized bed that’s not really big enough.

“At least we can save on hotel rooms,” Alex murmurs.

“We need a king,” says Tatsuya.

Alex elbows him in the side, but gently. After all, though Taiga’s the one who made the move now, and she’s the one who had gotten this thing off the ground, they wouldn’t have ever been a band at all if Tatsuya hadn’t dragged her out of retirement all these many years ago. That debt of gratitude doesn’t transfer to this half-hearted annoyance in theory, but feelings are very often irrational. Maybe she can write a song about this one.


End file.
